Microbial Platform for Glycosylation and Polysaccharide Biosynthesis

Microorganisms utilize simple carbon sources such as glucose and xylose to propagate and generate a variety of small molecules, which forms the foundation of the biotechnology industry. With metabolic engineering efforts, large-scale production of these small molecules such as amino acids, antibiotics, organic acids and alcohols has been achieved through microbial fermentation. While the productivities, titers and yields of these molecules have been continuously improved through various metabolic engineering approaches, the low efficiency associated with microbial synthesis of the compounds that use sugar molecules as direct building blocks, such as polysaccharides and glycosylated molecules, remain unsolved. Within this lecture, the design, construction and optimization of a microbial platform that is suitable for supporting efficient production of polysaccharides and glycosylated molecules are presented. As an example, biosynthesis of trehalose, a disaccharide of glucose, is used to demonstrate the applicability of this platform.